The debate arrived with the school year, as it does now every fall: does artificial intelligence help students learn, or does it quietly erode their capacity to think at all?
Rod Naquin, a high school English teacher in Louisiana, has an answer, and it runs against the grain of the current alarm. In an essay published by The Free Press, Naquin writes that he and his students 'are not outsourcing our minds to machines.' On the contrary, he says, they are learning more — and he is teaching better — than either could have managed without the tool.
Naquin is blunt about the case against him. He catalogs the warnings that have circulated for what he calls 'the last four years': claims that using a chatbot amounts to cognitive off-loading, cognitive debt, even, in the words of one commentator he cites, 'cognitive cancer.' He hears the familiar complaints too — that students no longer do their homework, no longer write their own essays, no longer read the books assigned to them.
His response is dismissive of the premise more than the concern. Homework skipped, essays outsourced, SparkNotes substituted for the text — none of that started with AI, he argues. 'The concerns about the effects of AI on students' learning are real, to a point,' Naquin writes, 'but they are also dramatically overstated.'
The Free Press published Naquin's essay alongside a deliberately opposing one. Deb Eaton, a high school English teacher in Philadelphia, prohibits AI in all her classes and argues other teachers should follow her. The two pieces were commissioned together, the editors say, precisely because teachers — not researchers, not pundits — have the clearest vantage point on what the technology is actually doing inside a classroom.
That is the whole of the record here: one teacher's account of integrating a new tool productively, set against another's account of banning it outright, both drawn from direct classroom experience rather than survey data or lab studies.
What the exchange makes plain is a trade-off American schools are working out in real time, mostly without help from Washington or from the loudest voices in the debate. Naquin's bet is that the discipline of using AI well — teaching students to interrogate it, edit it, argue with it — is itself an education, and a better one than pretending the tool doesn't exist.
The naysayers he quotes reach for the vocabulary of pathology: decline, debt, cancer. It is the language of institutions bracing to regulate first and ask questions later, and it should sound familiar to anyone who has watched a bureaucracy respond to any disruptive technology. Naquin's essay is a reminder that the people closest to the actual work — not the commentariat, not the administrative caution that governs so much of public education — are often the ones best positioned to separate real risk from moral panic.
His argument does not settle the question. Eaton's classroom, run on the opposite premise, is proof that reasonable teachers can look at the same tool and reach opposite conclusions. But the fact that both experiments are happening, teacher by teacher, classroom by classroom, rather than by top-down decree, is itself the healthier outcome — and the one a system built on local judgment and individual accountability should welcome rather than suppress.
